Uncover Graphene Industry Nuggets: The Mobile Phone Industry Chain Takes The Lead In "Resonance"?

At the end of February, Sun Changxu, partner of millet industry investment department, disclosed that millet has invested in Guangdong graphite Technology Co., Ltd. It also said that Mo Rui technology is the only new material technology enterprise covering the production of graphene from the chemical method to the mass production of high-performance thermal conductive films, which is another "black technology" for millet investment.

After being labeled with "graphene", "black technology" and "domestic only", it has suddenly become the focus of attention of the industry.

Why can Mo Rui technology attract the investment of Xiaomi? What is the black technology of graphene thermal conductive film? In March 10th, with these questions, the twenty-first Century economic report interviewed Cai Jinming, chairman of Mo Rui technology.

Cai Jinming is an expert in the field of low dimensional nanomaterials. His earliest research on graphene dates back to 2005, when he was studying for Ph.D. at the Institute of physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It needs to be understood that graphene was only discovered by two scientists in Britain in 2004, and they won the Nobel prize in physics in 2010.

Later, Cai Jinming visited visiting Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2008, and went to the Swiss Confederation Institute of materials science and technology from 2009 to 2014 to pursue postdoctoral studies. During that time, he has been focusing on graphene research.

In October 2015, Mo Rui science and technology was a great technological transformation of Cai Jinming after he returned home as a "returned overseas Chinese".

Converting graphene into products

Graphene has been in existence for more than ten years since its discovery. It has long been nothing new. But in Cai Jinming's view, 2015 is the first year of development of graphene.

"After the 2010 Nobel prize in physics, graphene has become a hot field. In 2011, many enterprises began to do related products, but until 2015, there were some graphene products in the market." Cai Jinming said.

Seeing graphene's economic benefits has also greatly strengthened Cai Jinming's determination to start a business. Since its return from Switzerland in 2014, it began to investigate in China. "I have studied graphene for nearly 10 years and want to transform it from laboratory to product". After a year's planning, Mo Rui technology was born.

Cai Jinming, who has never worked in an enterprise, has found a co founder. Zhao Hongzhong, general manager of Mo Rui technology, is Cai Jinming's junior high school student and has been working in government departments. After the establishment of the company, the two party has a clear division of labor, Cai Jinming is in charge of technology, and Zhao Hongzhong is in charge of enterprise management.

In the past 5 years of development history, there are two very crucial nodes: first of all, in October 2016, we established the Research Institute of Tao Rui graphene in cooperation with the government of Dao Jiao Town in Dongguan, followed by December 2018 and the Yunnan Yun Tian Hua Group jointly launched the project of graphene thermal conductive film production line.

Cai Jinming told the twenty-first Century economic report that when the technology was first established, it focused on how to mass produce graphene, and began to study the application of graphene. It was founded in 2017, that is, Tao Rui graphene Research Institute, and set up four applications: thermal management, new energy, advanced composite materials and bio health.

At present, there are two main methods for large-scale production of graphene, namely, mechanical and chemical methods. Among them, the mechanical method is mainly by grinding, ultrasonic and other physical means to remove graphene from graphite, the chemical rule is to use strong oxidants evenly inserted into the graphite layer, through the expansion of graphene separated layer by layer.

From the output results, the mechanical graphene layers are numerous, uneven and generally characterized, but because of the low technical threshold and low cost, most graphene products in the market are of this type. Although graphene has less layers, high uniformity and good performance, it requires very high mass production technology, so the number of enterprises that can produce is very small.

In October 2018, when he was in a talent exchange activity, Cai Jinming accidentally discovered a new production line of artificial graphite, which is a subsidiary equipment of Yunnan Yun Tian Hua group, which is also a production equipment of graphene thermal conductive film.

At that time, Cai Jinming made a detailed understanding of the company and expressed his intention to cooperate. In December of the same year, Mo Rui technology signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Yun Tian Han. In May of next year, the two sides set up a joint venture to start the production of chemical graphene thermal conductive film.

The cooperation with Yun Tian Hua is a coincidence by Cai Jinming, but it is precisely because of this opportunity that Mo Rui technology has the "national only" label.

Cai Jinming told reporters that other enterprises that do chemical graphene thermal conductive film can only do the single link of thermal conductive film production, and graphene raw materials also need to be purchased from outside. Through cooperation with Yun Tian Hua, the technology has achieved large-scale production from the preparation of chemical graphene to thermal conductive film and subsequent die cutting.

Moreover, the production line of graphene thermal conductive film is located inside the specialized chemical industrial park. It can realize the circular economy with the traditional chemical industry of Yunnan and reduce the cost of environmental protection and production.

"The concentrated sulfuric acid produced by Yun Tian Hua is the raw material for graphene preparation, while the dilute acid produced by graphene production can be used as raw material for chemical production," Cai Jinming said. If produced elsewhere, these wastes need special environmental protection companies to manage.

Smart phone's rigid demand

At present, the thermal conductive film is the fastest in several graphene applications developed by Mo Rui science and technology. This is mainly due to the continuous improvement of the performance of consumer electronics products represented by smart phones in recent years. Especially with the coming of the 5G era, the demand for heat dissipation of products is further increased.

The thermal conductivity of graphene has now been proved to be the best among all single materials. In October 2018, HUAWEI introduced the technology of graphene heat dissipation for the first time in its Mate 20 X. It also opened the curtain of the application of graphene in smart phones.

Cai Jinming told the twenty-first Century economic report that before the application of graphene cooling technology, smart phones use artificial graphite sheets to conduct heat conduction. However, the raw material of artificial graphite sheet is polyimide film. On the one hand, the material needs to import and the cost is higher. On the other hand, the thickness of the artificial graphite sheet prepared by polyimide film can reach up to 40 microns at present. If we want to further thicken, the heat conduction effect will be affected by multilayer stacking.

Compared with artificial graphite sheets, the graphene can be made domestically and imported without further import. At the same time, the thermal conductivity of graphene is better and the thickness can be customized. For example, the thermal conductivity of monolayer graphene thermal conductive film and multilayer artificial graphite sheet is almost the same, but the cost is lower and there is room for improvement.

Under the same performance, graphene is cheaper, and graphene has better performance at the same price. It is this high cost performance that triggering the "resonance" of the industry chain, which is the most urgent thing for mobile phone manufacturers to compete.

At the end of 2018, after the launch of the cooperation project with Yun Tian Hua, Mo Rui technology started financing. According to the twenty-first Century economic report reporter, in early 2019, an investment organization in Shanghai invested Pre-A investment in Mo Rui technology. Then in July 2019 and November, Shenzhen Venture Capital and Xiaomi were added to the A round investment.

Cai Jinming told reporters that Mo Rui technology has received tens of millions of yuan financing in the A round. "We plan to achieve 100 thousand square meters of monthly capacity by the end of this year. According to the 1 square supply of 100 mobile phones, we can supply 10 million mobile phones."

According to the IDC report, there were 1 billion 371 million mobile phone shipments in the world in 2019, of which China had about 370 million mobile phone shipments. With the increase in penetration of 5G phones, IDC expects that the market size of graphene thermal conductive film will reach US $2 billion 300 million in two to three years.

Cai Jinming predicts that by 2022, the net profit of Mo Rui technology can reach 250 million yuan. In addition, Mo Rui technology will continue to iterate new products in other applications, such as graphene conductive agent and graphene mask.

Mo Rui technology is a typical technology start-up company. Up to now, the whole team has no more than 40 people, but it includes 3 National thousand person planners. At the end of the interview, Cai Jinming disclosed to reporters a "big plan": "if the development is successful, we hope to be able to land in the capital market within 5 years".

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